Posts Tagged ‘Devices’

People use their mobile devices everywhere: on the train, while waiting in line, sitting on the couch. As much as we aim to design our mobile apps and websites for contextual use, testing their usability in context can be challenging.

While getting out in the field for user testing is not always realistic, simulating much of that contextual experience in a lab is possible. One approach to mobile testing is participatory design.

Do you know which platforms and email clients to focus on when creating an email newsletter for yourself or a client? Using the data from over 22 billion email subscribers, we determined what designers should prioritize, both this year and beyond.

In this article, we’ll interpret the numbers from our “Email Marketing Trends” report to help designers like you make informed decisions about what works and what doesn’t in email newsletters.

“Know your audience” has stood as a fundamental marketing principle since long before the web. When advertising online, you need to take into account one of the most basic factors of the audience you are reaching: what devices they are using.

The most popular online advertising platform, in use by marketers of all sizes, is Google AdWords. Up until early 2013, AdWords allowed advertisers to set up separate campaigns to target mobile devices. Best practice generally entailed targeting mobile, desktop and sometimes tablet users in unique campaigns.

My Android Galaxy smartphone is so sweet. It plays games, has a lovely screen and lets me check all of my favorite websites while I’m commuting to and from work. And my new iPad is even better; it’s all I use at home when I’m relaxing in the living room, cooking in the kitchen or toileting on the toilet. As a consumer of electronic gadgets, I’m happier than Angelina Jolie in an orphanage with all of the devices with which I can use to access the Internet. As a developer, I hate it.

Have you seen how many browsers and devices we have to test now? I remember when Internet Explorer (IE) 8 came out and we were annoyed that we had to start testing six browsers. Now, we’re testing at least 15! Back then, when every home had broadband and before anyone had a smartphone, we were living in the Golden Age of web development. We never knew how easy our jobs were.

There are many strategies to choose from when developing a modern, device independent website nowadays. How should capabilities of the device or browser be determined? Should the presentation logic be server side or client side? Traditionally, mobile optimization had to happen server side.

Over the last couple of years, Responsive Web Design and tools like Modernizr have become very popular. Recently, combination techniques (often called RESS), where optimization is done both server-side and client-side, has become a trend. The recently launched WURFL.js tool, fits into this category.

A recent study (PDF) found that more than 80% of people are disappointed with the experience of browsing Web on mobile devices and would use their smartphones more if the browsing experience improved.

This isn’t surprising when 64% of smartphone users expect websites to load in 4 seconds or less, while the average website takes more than twice that amount, at 9 seconds. This article explains techniques you can use to make your websites faster on mobile devices.

Designing websites for smartphones is easy compared to retrofitting those already in place. More than that, it’s embarrassing how, almost eight years after CSS gained practical acceptance, a lack of foresight haunts those of us who write HTML.

Converting older websites to responsive design causes headaches not because small screens are difficult, but because most HTML documents were written under an assumption about screen size.

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Fixing RWD issues can be quite easy — once you understand exactly why they come up. The Mobile Web Handbook will help you understand technical issues on mobile and how to deal with them effectively.

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